John Atkinson: Yes, MQA IS Elegant...

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the one thing I like about mqa is Miska's sweet mqa mp filter 

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On 8/20/2018 at 11:30 PM, FredericV said:

The end to end argument requires drivers which do not smear the time domain:

Example: bending wave driver:

 

Ribbons:

 

vs dynamic drivers (e.g. Wilson (source ) )

 

Most dynamic drivers can't stop the motion immediately, therefore never being able to recreate the time domain accurately. Most tweeters are just not fast enough to correctly playback non-periodic sounds & events.

Bass reflex also has an added time delay, therefore smearing the time domain.

Fix the speakers first, the errors here are much larger than what MQA is trying to solve.

Most speakers fail this test:

 

They can't reproduce the point source of the clapper hitting the bell, while they can reproduce the resonance of the bell. Frequency domain is not the issue here, but the time domain is.

 

You're right : there are more fundamental things to do when you have the privilege to talk to music producers, recording and mastering engineers as MQA people claim they do, such as making sure they use a calibrated  Stereo system and calibrating yours. However, I think loudspeakers can perform better than what you expect ; try REW + Rephase ; I get this from my Cabasse (30 years old dynamic drivers, pre SCS) 

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I too would advocate for fast rise times amps etc and my rational for the (slight but consistent) benefit of hires over redbook when each and every source benefits from HQP's upsampling filters is better transients.

And I too readily join the MQA bashing team.

However, liking what "MQA style" does to redbook is not necessarily dishonest IMO since I consistently like HQP's polysinc mqa mp filter with redbook material; ie today listening to Neil Young's Weld.

So, maybe, rather that doubting that people can like something about MQA, I'd stress that whatever is to like might be obtained elsewhere, wether a true benefit or a flavour to liken for a while, WITHOUT all the dark side. I've never actually heard MQA neither do I care to do so but I think plausible it's a way to make redbook palatable ; just a way that is obsolete from the start and plain bad when it comes in the way of non degraded sources (that might be another way to write hires) and high class players that can provide MQA style just as a flavour, sometimes worth trying, but don't present it as nec plus ultra.

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I've read Jim Austin's literature on Stereophile and it made me wanna puke.

How can a publication advocate for the voluntary distribution of a voluntarily degraded format so that "jewels of crown" are preserved ?

Furthermore, instead of promoting calibration (ie so yo don't have a funny x dB bump between say 1 and 1.5 K because a moron is mastering/approving etc with monitors with a dip in said region....) MQA as is is not even compatible with dsp hence room correction etc etc

 

Legal paid for streaming is winning, for movies or music, large enough bandwidth is available in the remotest places : even on DRM and content distribution MQA is dinosaur

 

Plus I'm bored yet with the MQA flavor of poly sinc filter in HQP when upsampling Redbook ; Closed form 16 M is so much better...

 

I'll never buy a DAC MQA colluded, will turn to another brand   ; will you ?

 

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12 hours ago, Jud said:

 

Here - a linear phase and a minimum phase filter.  See how there's no pre-ringing to possibly smear the initial transient in the minimum phase filter?

 

 

I'm not sure definitions are the same for Room correction softwares ; if I recall correctly minimum phase is there defined kind of path of least resistance with the shortest transfer time through the system. What I know for sure is that when you flatten your phase curve to 0 you can flatten (preferably with a downward slope) your frequency curve and that's awesome. 

I think that RePhase outputs linear phase convolution filters ; I very recently discovered I prefer linear phase versions of HQP filters in conjunction with my rePase convolution filters that yield to this :

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5 hours ago, mansr said:

That doesn't make much sense. The output of an IIR filter is a linear combination of input samples and previous output samples. FIR filters use only input samples to create the output, making them a subset of IIR filters. If anything IIR filters are more "powerful" since they can achieve things impossible with FIR. For example, an impulse response consisting of a step function is trivial as an IIR (current input + previous output). IIR filters can also be unstable and oscillate or increase without bound. Some FIR filters have an equivalent IIR filter with fewer taps, which is cheaper to realise. This probably what they are referring to in the last bit.

what do you think of Cascaded integrator–comb filter ? doesn't moving average promoted by Ayre belong to that family?

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7 hours ago, mansr said:

A moving average filter has a rectangular impulse response. Its Fourier transform is the sinc function scaled by the width of the rectangle.

 

Yesterday I switched to CIC as integrator in HQPlayer and liked it ; so you mean it can't sound better but for it's new and a change to my ears and that it has a different impulse response than IIR and FIR and sounds... square ?

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2 hours ago, mansr said:

I mean nothing of the kind.

and back to my initial question I simply wanted to know your opinion on CIC, SQ wise ; since you're debating FIR vs IIR, I was simply adding CIC to the discussion

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So, after the MQA campaign, which audiophile magazines, paper or online, can we read ?